The Woman Who Looked at Faces And Saw Dragons

Instead of human faces, she saw reptiles.

KATIE SILVER

25 FEB 2018

In July 2011, a woman presented at a psychiatric clinic in the Netherlands reporting something truly bizarre: for her entire life she'd seen multiple peoples' faces change into dragon-like faces - an hallucination that occurred many times a day.

"She could perceive and recognise actual faces, but after several minutes they turned black, grew long, pointy ears and a protruding snout, and displayed a reptiloid skin and huge eyes in bright yellow, green, blue, or red," the research team wrote in The Lancet in 2014.

"She saw similar dragon-like faces drifting towards her many times a day from the walls, electrical sockets, or the computer screen, in both the presence and absence of face-like patterns, and at night she saw many dragon-like faces in the dark."

The 52-year-old was suffering from what's known as prosopometamorphopsia; a psychiatric disorder in which faces appear distorted.

The researchers couldn't work out what was causing this to occur. They performed a host of different brain scans including MRI, electroencephalogram (EEG), and neurological examinations, as well as blood tests. All were normal.

Sacks, who was part of the research team looking into the woman's case, has a face recognition disorder himself, where he doesn't process the shapes that make up a person's face as a face.

Researchers are unclear about what causes prosopometamorphopsia, but it can be induced by taking hallucinogenic drugs as well as strokes and tumours, which affect certain areas of the brain.

One such area is thought to be the fusiform gyrus, which is the part of our brain associated with face recognition. The fusiform gyrus is located in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, and damage to it can make people hallucinate or unable to recognise faces.

Still, this woman's hallucinations were particularly rare, being so specific.

After much trial-and-error, her doctors found that an anti-dementia medication called rivastigmine conquered the dragons, for the most part.